Wading
in the Slipstream: A Close Reading of Amy Hempel's “The Uninvited”

“Just when you think you’ve dreamt it, it comes
again.”

Struggling
to define a new genre of literature, Bruce Sterling (with the assistance of
Richard Dorsett) coined the term “Slipstream.” Sterling claims
that this new genre has “set its face against consensus reality.” His
ultimate description of slipstream is that “this is a kind of writing
which simply make you feel very strange” (Sterling). This intriguing,
but uninformative, definition only makes sense when you closely examine an
example of slipstream literature. Amy Hempel’s short story, “The
Uninvited,” beautifully illustrates some of the techniques used to create
the strangeness that characterizes slipstream.

One method
Hempel uses to evoke strangeness is to slip in and out of time. Her narrative
does not move across time in a traditional, chronological fashion, nor does
it make use of flashbacks in the accepted sense. Instead, she creates
an intricate braid of time, interweaving strands of present, near past, far
past, and unrelated fiction. This complexity of time highlights the situation
of the fifty-year-old narrator in “The Uninvited,” who counts off
the days that she is “late” and fears pregnancy. Obsessed
with this fear, she creates the time braid through free-association about her
past and memories of a movie she associates with pregnancy tests. The
narrator seeks to make time stop, unbinding herself from its forward flow (329),
thereby staving off the pain of a decision “made quickly, and not at
all quickly forgotten” (320).

Another
technique Hempel uses to inject strangeness into “The Uninvited” is
to twist the meaning of traditional symbols and images. Throughout the
story, for example, she uses real estate to symbolize the violated body of
her narrator. In the mainstream world, homes are sacred and inviolate
castles that symbolize love and security. In the slipstream world, however,
homes are frequently deserted and vulnerable, their owners transient. When
she is attacked, the narrator is house-sitting, living in a home filled with
the mementoes of other people’s lives (332). Her own vacant home
is attacked by both the weather, causing a burst pipe, and by marauding mice, “scrabbling
in the cabinets and behind the walls” (319). The newspaper provides
details of pointless, nonsensical attacks on other homes; in one, the thermostat
is turned up high enough to warp the floors, while in another, nothing is stolen
but all kitchen cabinets are neatly and methodically emptied (319). The
ancestral home of the narrator’s ex-husband (no longer a real home but
merely a show-place) has been so neglected and pillaged that “by the
time the family voted funds for an alarm, there was nothing of value left to
protect” (326). Even fences, normally a protective device, are
pulled apart and burned in bonfires on the beach (331). Hempel uses the
fate of property to echo the fragility of the narrator as she recalls her rape
experience: “It is not always desire, either. Except as the desire
to save oneself by doing what one is told to do by the person who has the knife” (330).

Another twisted image used by Hempel involves the traditionally
venerated status of motherhood. “All of us should be safe in a
tiny velvet pouch,” (319)
says the narrator, conjuring up an image of a fetus in the womb. But
if there is a fetus, it is not welcome in this setting. The piece of
valuable jewelry that prompts this remark is not protected and cherished, as
a child would presumably be—instead, it is left loose in a drawer, surrounded
by mouse droppings “like fat, dark grains of rice” (319). In
fact, Hempel uses multiple images to illustrate the narrator’s fear of
a possible pregnancy and her desire not to “contain” a fetus. Trying
to replace a ruined soaker hose with what turns out to be a regular hose, she
stabs the rubber repeatedly, “making my own goddamn soaker hose” (328),
thus ensuring that nothing is contained. A vase (classic symbol of a
pregnant woman) falls from the mantel, spilling all its contents. The
narrator’s ironic response to this event shows her tortured feelings
about containment: “What a relief, this loss” (329). “Containment
is also holy” (329), the narrator is told, but not under these circumstances.
Divorced and raped, she has no frame of reference for a positive relationship
with either a man or a child: “Successful collaborations inspire envy
in me. But ‘collaborate,’ someone
once told me, also means ‘to betray’” (330).

Hempel
also incorporates allusions to the unexpected as a way of threading strangeness
through her story. In “The Uninvited,” she accomplishes this
through multiple references to the 1944 movie, The Uninvited. Quotes
from, references to, and summaries of this movie both interrupt and interact
with Hempel’s narrative. The movie revolves around an old house
haunted by two ghosts, one representing a protective, loving mother, and the
other an angry, murderous mother. Exploring
the braid of time, we discover both of these mothers in the narrator. As
a college student, she aborted her first child, obtaining medical consent by
means of a threat to kill herself if not allowed to end the pregnancy (321).
At a later time, however, she was hospitalized as she struggled to keep a pregnancy,
an attempt which was ultimately unsuccessful. “Sometimes the body
takes over to make a decision the mind can’t make” (323), she is
told by a doctor. This remark echoes forward in time, as the narrator
recoils from the possibility of motherhood in her present circumstances.

Perhaps
the most effective device that Hempel utilizes to add strangeness, however,
is the perversion of the expected. Faced by a knife-wielding rapist,
the narrator does whatever she has to do to survive, even if that means creating
the hollow mockery of a relationship. “Stay,” she tells the
violent but impotent man. “It’s enough that you’re
here” (333). This causes him to put down the knife and embrace
her, ironically allowing him to consummate the rape itself. Faced with
the possibility of a pregnancy, the narrator is so fearful she cannot even
read the results of her test kit. Instead, she offers herself as a test
subject for a paranormal experiment being conducted on dogs. This is
the final, perverse image Hempel leaves us with—the narrator down on
all fours like a dog, waiting for the response of a dangling chain to her magnetic
field to determine whether she is pregnant or not.

All of the
devices and techniques incorporated by Hempel into “The Uninvited” give
it the air of strangeness described by Sterling. Though the story presents
seemingly realistic settings and characters, Hempel subtly skews their presentation.
The result is a narrative intended to “sarcastically tear at the structure
of ‘everyday life’” (Sterling). This is slipstream
writing at its finest; strange realism (or realistic strangeness) that haunts
the reader long after the story is done.